Herbert Croly's Timeline: Life, Photos, and Key Events

"Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions, democracy is at best a more than usually safe form of political organization . . . . But if it is to work better as well as merely longer, it must have some leavening effect on human nature; and the sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of the leaven.?[Progressive]"

"I am not concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of democracy is socialistic . . . (democracy) should be characterized not so much socialistic, as unscrupulously and loyally nationalistic.?[Progressive]"

"In becoming responsible for the subordination of the individual to the demand of a dominant and constructive national purpose, the American state will in effect be making itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable distribution of wealth.?[Progressive]"

"The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes. In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested mot"

"If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.?[Progressive]"

"If the American people balk at the sacrifices demanded by their experiments, or if they attach finality to any particular experiment in the distribution of political, economic, and social power, they will remain morally and intellectually at the bottom of a well . . .?[Progressive]"

"[T]he national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a collective purpose.?[Progressive]"

"In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests. To ask an individual citizen continually to sacrfice his recognize private interest to the welfare of his countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a continual sacrifice is apparently required of an in"

"The way in which people spend their leisure after the days journey is over ? the way in which they play ? offers them the best chance of contributing to the enhancement of one anothers lives. If the time ever comes when poverty is comparatively negligible and when human impoverishment can no longer be charged up to gross economic maladjustments, ? if such a time ever comes, as it well may, the rule of live-and-help-live will assume a better meaning than it has at present and will challenge the d"